We’ve come back from the Con this week and have jumped back into the thick of things. We’re entering the stretch run to get 2.01 out the door this month. Superfly is working on getting the B-24 interior completed and Natedog has been working on a T-34. 76mm 1943 model before you ask. There’s still a lot to pull together in a short amount of time, so the crunch is on for us. All the planes currently missing their damage effects have already had them completed for 2.01.
I get a lot of questions about future plane development and how long it will take. We’ve spent a good bit of time on the Ki-84 and B-24 in trial and error figuring out the best compromise between looks, detail, performance, download size, production time, etc. as these planes are setting the new standard that future development will follow. For these first two planes, almost everything has had to be built from scratch. As we move forward, we don’t have to do every single detail from scratch. So we don’t have to make a new instrument, or turret, texture, gunsight, etc. if it’s already something that we have. Now that we’re getting tooled up so to speak, we’re looking forward to really getting the production line going. We really want to make our push towards 100 and beyond.
So that begs the question how are we going to do that and overhaul the existing planes. Well the answer is not all at once. It is going to be a process. What we don’t want to do is have that process stifle new plane development. So we are committed to delivering new planes and not just updating the existing ones. The update process itself is not as bad as the sheer numbers indicate because much of that will be coming off in clumps as entire series are redone together. We’ll also be looking at some ways to maximize our manpower like possibly outsourcing some tasks that can be accomplished outside our office.
We also have a number of variants that we haven’t done yet and we’ll be using this process as a way to expedite getting those done. So planes with obvious variants that are still unseen in AH like the P-38 will be prime candidates to be reworked sooner rather than later.
Most big changes come by way of version updates. 2.01 is a bit different because one of the big programming projects going on is independent of the 2.01 release. This is an update to the terrain system that allows the editor to make fully customized terrain cells including textures, trees, hills, objects, etc. The real cool thing is that it will also allow new objects to be made and imported into the terrain using a 3rd party object editor. So if you’ve ever had the urge to fly under the Arc de Triomphe for example, you don’t need us to make it. There’s some other effects being worked on in this area as well, but we’ll hold off talking about them until we have them working comfortably.
We’re also in the process of making a new TV commercial for AH. I’m looking for some cool AH2 films to get some footage from. They must be from AH2 and in the AH film format(.ahf files, no avi’s). If you have something that you think would look nice on TV, please send it to me. I can’t guarantee that we’ll use it, but we’ll take a look at it and see if it fits. Maybe you’ll get to see yourself on TV, at least virtually. I need them quick, so if you are interested in donating any films, please try to get them to me before the weekend is over.
